I Make Some Gods, Sort of — STEVEN HARDESTY

Don’t know how I did it but yesterday I created two new gods. Bingo! Just like that. Now I don’t know what to do with them.

I made them out of a couple of scumbag ruffians masquerading as proper princes in a manic parody sword-&-sorcery tale featuring the greatest of all medieval heroes and titled (both my hero and the novel) The Prince of Cowards. (Set in the ghastly world of An Earthman Born, if you want to know.)

It is one shocking surprise to be keying along at ultra-lightspeed - making my hero and his warrior band jump this way and that as various misadventures strike them - when I suddenly see pop up on my laptop screen the staggering news that two very secondary characters only meant for a quick mention have become gods.

What do I do with fresh-made gods in this story, and not very effectual gods, at that? Shove them howling and protesting between my hero, his trollish sidekick and the hordes of half-human fiends howling down on them? Make them rebuild the illusion of a city’s walls and battlements to give my hero a place to cower with his famous double-headed battleaxe? Tell me, please.

This is what happens when you write as I do - by the seat of the pants. Meaning no plotting out the whole thing in advance. No elaborate character sketches on which to draw. Not even a scribbled map taking the hero from here to over there. Pantsing means you stumble across a great character or a sleek opening line or a curious predicament and start hammering the keys so you the writer can find out where it all leads.

Writing is an adventure for a pantser. The story could go this way or that and often does. Gods appear and disappear. Tree lobsters fall on the hero’s helmeted head or his troll runs out of the gamot oil that keeps all his/her/its internal plastic parts clicking over. Those damn warfrogs get bigger and bigger and hungrier for human flesh. (Well, everyone on this planet has an exquisite taste for exquisite humans.) Castles rear up stone-solid to melt away into delusion, and what’s my hero to do about it all?

I don’t know and I won’t find out until The End.

Meantime, I have to work with a hero who’s got a problem - he’s a coward hungry to become a hero to himself. His troll’s got a different problem - after 1,000 years of living and bored, he/she/it wants to try death but getting dead for a troll requires meeting a jillion bureaucratic rules. The one-eyed, three-handed lady archer who can’t decide over which eye to slide her furry eyepatch. And the boy Bob, the greatgreatgreatgrandson of the famous warrior-king a’Qonan, who merely wants to go home, thank you, and forget all this adventuring because it’s so hard on his feet which keep getting chopped off faster than they grow back.

And now I’ve got these new gods in the swirling mix. Maybe it’s time for a new pair of pants.

Cheers & keep safe out there!